Our nation’s thirtieth president was the very great, totally underrated Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929).
Coolidge’s tremendously successful presidential tenure – resulted in what we now call the Roaring Twenties: “(T)he period of Western society and Western culture that occurred during and around the 1920s. It was a period of sustained economic prosperity….The United States gained dominance in world finance.…”
How did Coolidge get us there? With less government, natch.
Coolidge thought government – America’s comparably-microscopic 1920s governments – was way too overactive, overreaching, over-abusive and over-spending.
In 1924, he gave a speech on what he called the debilitating “stupendous sum” of total United States governments’ expenditures. All governments everywhere in America spent per year…$7.5 billion ($108 billion in today’s coin).
Get that comparatively tiny sum? Today’s Feds all by their onesies add more than that adjusted $108 billion – each and every day – to our $20+ trillion national debt.
What did Coolidge prefer instead of government? Quite simple, really: “The business of America is business.” He wanted government out of the way – to allow Americans to do what they do. And Americans – roared.
Why all this Coolidge? To elucidate – and to help get us to this:
Due to health issues, Coolidge napped 2-3 hours most afternoons. He joked that he did this – to minimize the damage his government could do to America.
Coolidge’s big-government-favoring detractors howled at him for his not providing the necessary governmental stewardship (missing entirely Coolidge’s point that it wasn’t needed).
In response to said balderdash, Coolidge would often awaken from a nap and ask: “Is the country still here?”
It is of Coolidge’s excellence legacy – and tongue-in-cheek query – that I have thought every morning since the Donald Trump Administration’s Thursday undoing of the Barack Obama Administration’s Network Neutrality Internet power grab.
In advance of this reasoned, reasonable rollback of this titanic, titanically stupid government assault on the Web – today’s big-government-favoring detractors were in full-on freak out mode.
Here are but a few of the whacked-out, delirious, projecting headlines penned before the removal of Obama’s power grab:
The FCC Plans to Repeal Net Neutrality This Week – And It Could Ruin the Internet
A Look At What Net Neutrality Repeal Could Mean
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Bring Slow Internet
How a Net Neutrality Rollback Could Create a Tiered Internet
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Hurt Web Businesses
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Crush Small Businesses
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Damage Local News Startups
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Wreck Hollywood And Big Media
Net Neutrality Repeal Could Impact College Students
Behold the avalanche of neurotic nonsense.
Were one completely ignorant and uninformed, one would think the Internet should have collapsed into a heap of smoldering 1s and 0s…about a half hour after the Trump Administration passed the rollback.
Of course, it did not. I awaken each morning and check my phone, thinking Coolidge-ly to myself “Is the Internet still here?”
Sure enough – it is.
And it will be. For a wide variety of variations – all on the same Coolidge-esque theme.
Free people left to their own devices – do quite nicely, thank you very much.
The Trump Administration did nothing more than restore the exact same laws, rules and regulations – that governed the Internet from it’s 1996 private sector inception all the way up to Obama’s 2015 power grab.
A period during which anyone not totally addled by Leftist ideological fervor – readily hails as perhaps the greatest expansion of a human endeavor in human history.
During which the Internet went from “What’s that?” – to 1/6th of our entire $18 trillion economy.
The Left bizarrely, breathlessly claims restoring that wondrous status quo – is the end of the World Wide Web.
All of those headline projections of what might happen – are a really tough sell. Given that none of that stuff ever happened during the twenty government-free years pre-Obama power grab.
In fact, the Left’s freak-out, phony projections about this repeal only reveal something – about the Left.
Human nature dictates we view the world – through our own prism. It’s the only one with which each of us has to work.
The big government Left thinks all of these awful things will happen to the Internet without centralized power – because it’s exactly what the Left would do with centralized power.
Oh wait: When the Left has centralized power – it’s exactly what they do.
Google Is the World’s Biggest Censor
Google Is Using Its Immense Power To Censor Content That Doesn’t Fit Its Political Goals
Censorship of Conservatives Out of Control at Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
YouTube Censorship: Conservatives Banned, but Not the Hate Imams
Mainstream Media Uses ‘Fake News’ to Censor Conservative Views
And the Left has support for their censorship. Here:
The Battle Against ‘Hate Speech’ Gives Rise to a Generation that Hates Speech
A Third of Americans Support Tech Companies Using SPLC ‘Hate Group’ List to Blacklist Conservatives
And from huge governments all around the world:
North Korea: Where the Internet Has Just 5,500 Sites: “(I)n the repressive country the OS is ‘Red Star’ and the web isn’t very world wide.”
Internet Censorship: How Iran is Filtering Out Dissent
Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia
China’s Scary Lesson to the World: Censoring the Internet Works
Censoring the Internet does indeed work.
So it is a very good thing the Trump Administration just dramatically diminished the U.S. government’s ability to do it here.
This first appeared in Red State.